2008 Beijing Olympics

A coach's view from the trenches

As someone who has been to a good number of Olympics, world championships and major international competitions, I come to expect nothing and try to prepare for everything, yet after each one I learn something new. I think that this time around I learned that to try and replicate the past successes of the U.S. team is not only a bad idea, but one that doesn't account for other countries making changes to what didn't work for them. We can never go back and repeat history exactly. Nor should we want to, no matter how great the successes were for us in the past.

When I got home I spent the first week sifting through all the unread emails and phone messages, and they all asked the same thing: What happened over there? I wasn't exactly sure how to take it or answer it, because I didn't quite know myself. There were some phenomenal performances by U.S. athletes and some not so great ones. In events in which we were seemingly unbeatable, we got beat and sometimes swept, as in the women's 100m. In the men's sprints one young man from a small island seemed to dismantle our whole nation of sprinters.

Yet we must not forget the high points. My hat is off to Shalane Flanagan and how she battled through the stomach flu just days before her race, to battle through an even tougher test -- an Olympic 10,000m final that saw two women break 30:00. Shalane persevered to make it home in third place, while running a new American record. That was a phenomenal run, and we were all so excited for her. We thought that it was a good start to what would be a greater ending for the U.S. team. However, it proved to be just a peak on our roller coaster ride that saw many ups and downs along the way, some bigger, some smaller, but most coming quite unexpectedly.

In the midst of the craziness of those nine days of track and field, the one event that really stuck out as a bizarre high was the women's discus. I know this is a distance-running magazine, but I have to give a giant thumbs up to someone that you have probably never heard of and may never hear of again. It's my guess that not even many people on the U.S. track team knew who Stephanie Brown-Trafton was prior to her shining night.

Stephanie managed to finish only third at the Olympic trials in the discus, but on her first throw in the Olympic final she launched a throw that would not be matched the rest of the night. On that one day the stars aligned for Stephanie, and she let it happen. Somewhere in the back of her mind she decided to say, "OK, this is why I trained so hard for the past four years," so if that window of opportunity opened for a brief moment in time, she sure as hell wasn't going to be caught sleeping. She jumped through with all her might and got to the other side. She woke up that morning a nobody in the public eye and went to bed that night with an Olympic gold medal around her neck. Only the Olympics seem to create days as crazy as this one for every athlete out there on the track or in the field.

One of the runners I coach, Ryan Hall, had one of those crazy days. He executed the game plan that we set up for him in the men's marathon and finished 10th in his first Olympics. What kept Ryan from finishing higher was that the event changed right before his eyes. The last time that the marathon changed was when, in 2001, Naoko Takahashi became the first woman to break 2:20. At the time, a woman breaking 2:20 was like a man running the first sub-4:00 mile: It just didn't seem possible for so long, and then it happened twice within two weeks, and the event became a new one for every elite woman marathoner. For the men it had been much longer since anything radically new had happened, maybe not since Italy's Gelindo Bordin showed the world that you can negative split a 26.2-mile race and still win.

On August 24, however, the marathon as we know it changed. It took a big group of men who had no business running that fast, and one man who knew exactly what he was doing, to break the field and change how we will look at racing the marathon. Some time in his marathon buildup, Kenya's Sammy Wanjiru had come to the realization that he could go out at world-record pace in the heat and humidity of Beijing and not crash and burn like so many others had before him. Not only did he realize this, but he also understood that he could do it by surging all the way to the finish line. New York City Marathon elite athlete coordinator David Monti put it best when he said that it was a 26.2-mile boxing match. Sammy attacked with blows in the pace that made everyone in the front pack dash as hard as they could and then try to recover before he did it again. Each surge knocked out one competitor after another until there was no one left standing.

Each surge also brought Ryan closer to the front, as he chose the wiser path on this day by staying off the pace in such conditions. Ryan was as far back as 40th place before moving up through the field to finish 10th. Although we would like to think that he may have finished higher had he taken a bigger risk, I believe that this would not have been the case, and he would have ended up like the rest of the running dead had he attempted such a plan. It was not the day for Ryan to run such a race, even though we would like it to have been. It was Sammy's day out there on the streets of Beijing.

What this day did show us is that there are new ways to look at the marathon -- that it is not a race distance to be feared, but to be respected and understood. I don't think that we truly understand everything yet about how to race such a distance. The future of the event is exciting. Ryan finished the race running as hard as he could. He finished a bit in shock over how fast Sammy had run, but after some time to reflect he has seen the door swing open for him. He has seen that there is a lot of room to grow. Next time out he will look to fulfill his own vision, one that will come to him on a hard long run somewhere up in the mountains.

So what did the U.S. team learn after competing in China? I think we learned that, once you believe the hype, then you are subject to the whims of your emotions and lose focus on what it takes to get the job done, plus how hard that it can really be at times. Whether this is worrying about heat, humidity and pollution, or believing that as a team we were unbeatable because of our recent history, once we forgot about spending time controlling the things that we could control and not worrying about what we couldn't, we seemed lost. In the meantime, countries like Jamaica, Ethiopia and Kenya got smarter. They reacted to losses at past championships and worked hard to fix those problems. They trained harder and smarter than ever before, and it showed. They showed us that talent alone was no longer going to get the job done -- it would take tenacity and a fiery spirit as well.

I also think the reason we were left in such shock was because of the high expectations that we had for our team this year. In the distance events we came in thinking that our men and women would win multiple medals. We practically expected it to happen, when in reality this is a very lofty goal. Yes, Deena and Meb both earned medals in 2004, and yes, Kara and Bernard both medaled as well in Osaka last year, but these were unexpected events that brought joy and surprise to the U.S. These were not events where we thought that our athletes could overcome the supremacy that had been shown for years by the East African countries. When we landed in Beijing, we were tallying up medals on form charts in most every event that had a U.S. athlete entered. It was a lofty goal, but not always a realistic one. Our athletes have now risen to such a level that we really believe that they can be players in the finals, but we all know that the Olympics gives out only three medals in each event every four years. It takes a lot of hard work to get there, but it also takes a bit of luck as well. Sometimes luck is on your side, and sometimes it isn't.

In a little less than four years, when our coaches and athletes are boarding that plane for London, hopefully we will have changed and accounted for the fact that this is a new Olympics. I know that I will be looking back at all that worked well and didn't this time around. I will be looking forward to anticipate what the unexpected may be, at what new little bit of information or advice will help to swing the pendulum our way. I will try to coach my athletes to enter into the stadium and look for that open window of opportunity so that they are ready to make that leap, because we never know how long it is going to stay open. On the track every hundredth of a second is precious. For an athlete knowing when to jump, when to sprint, when to lean is all about timing. Timing is all about experience. We have plenty of experience. We just need to open our eyes a little wider to see it.